Once the war began, physicists fleeing Europe immediately feared what the Nazis would do if they were the first to create an atomic bomb. The military applications of this were obvious, and it wasn't long before Germany began its Uranverein - or "uranium club ". The program began in April 1939, five months before the Nazis invaded Poland and touched off the Second World War. The Outbreak of World War IIĪfter the discovery of nuclear fission, it was quickly understood that nuclear fission in a large amount of uranium could produce a cascading chain reaction that would release an incredible amount of energy. The physicists had discovered nuclear fission, just as the shadow of war descended over Europe in 1939. These elements combined had only four-fifths the atomic weight of the original uranium atom, so using Einstein's equation E = mc 2, Meitner and Frisch were able to show that the missing fifth was released as energy (200 MeV, to be exact). Then, one of the most consequential discoveries in physics came in December 1938 when physicists Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Otto Frisch worked out that bombarding a uranium atom with neutrons broke the atom into two smaller components. Nuclear physics was born when Ernest Rutherford split the atom in 1917. Dalton formulated a method of measuring the masses of various elements according to the way they combined with fixed masses of each other. European and Islamic scientists and philosophers picked up where Greek philosophers left off. Sometime around 1000 AD, bismuth was discovered by Persian alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan and in 1669, German alchemist Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus while trying to create the philosopher's stone, a legendary substance that was believed to turn metal into gold.Įven such scientific luminaries as Sir Isaac Newton could not help but dabble in alchemy, but it wasn't until the 18th and 19th centuries that atomic theory as we know it today was put on a more solid scientific footing.Īfter scientists like the 18th-century French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier began to isolate and identify individual elements like oxygen, John Dalton (1766-1844) developed his atomic theory.ĭalton claimed that atoms of different elements vary in size and mass, which refuted the long-held notions that atoms of all kinds of matter are alike. In the Middle Ages, questions about the true nature of matter straddled the line between practical sciences and the practice of alchemy. The name atom itself comes from the ancient Greek word atomos, which roughly means "uncuttable", and for about three millennia, the indivisibility of the atom was more of a philosophical position than a scientific one. The idea of an indivisible unit of matter is an ancient idea going back to some of the earliest Greek and Indian texts on record, but some of the first to describe the concept of the atom were the ancient Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, in the fifth century BCE. No matter one's ultimate position on the issue of the atomic bombs that ended the Second World War, there is no question that few research projects have proven as consequential for human history as the Manhattan Project. While many notable scientists involved in the Manhattan Project would experience anguish, guilt, and horror over the consequences of their work, others saw the atomic bomb - and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that accompanied it - as the only way to secure lasting peace in the world. This is especially true for the people of Japan, the only nation that has ever suffered a nuclear attack. Under the codename Manhattan Project, the US effort in World War II to beat Nazi Germany to an atomic weapon had a complicated and unquestionably terrible legacy.
0 kommentar(er)
